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FORT COLLINS, Colo. (KDVR) – A Colorado woman’s childhood fear became reality when she leaned over her malfunctioning toilet and watched a large corn snake slither up and into the bowl last Wednesday.

“I used the restroom, like went to flush and everything and it wasn’t going down. I looked and leaned in closer and a snake head slithered up. I was terrified,” Miranda Stewart, of Fort Collins, said. 

(Credit: Miranda Stewart)

“It’s actually been one of my fears since I was a kid,” she told sister station KDVR. 

Stewart screamed for her boyfriend and called the maintenance man for the Varsity Apartments in Fort Collins.

When Wesley Sanford responded, he found the snake coiled up in the back forcing him to take the entire toilet apart.  

“C’mon buddy get out,” Sanford said. 

It took nearly 40 minutes to finally free the snake which he guessed was 4 feet long. So the big question is how in the did he get in there?

“We’re thinking it was a possible pet from one of the tenants from our apartment complex. If the snake got in their toilet and slithered to ours,” Stewart said. 

They searched the building for the owner and now the maintenance man has adopted the snake and brought him out to live on his ranch.

“I took him home and my wife was very happy with me and we named him Boots. He’s our little guard snake on the property,” Sanford said.

As for Stewart, this is a wild story she will tell for years to come, while she attempts to overcome her newfound phobia of the bathroom.  

“Now I’m just traumatized by a toilet.”